I've learned that Puppy may sniff and detect wireless with the best; but that some other distros do not leave me so confused as to which network, by default, I would want to connect to, whether I already had a lease; and always feeling I'm shoving the wizard offscreen because I must surely be done with it. Often as not in new environments ,I execute pwireless in the middle of connection, just to find out where I am, and to reduce an excess of redundant clicking.
I know this isn't easy, or MS would also have done it better years before they finally did, if they finally did so

Version numbers mean absolutely nothing. Surely, no distro demonstrates this better than Puppy. What start out as bug-fix releases end up adding new and removing old software, upgrading versions, adding new setup routines etc.

What this distro needs more than anything in the world is to have even two releases which are based on the same basic content and versions, using the same concept of what should be done or not done to make it complete. That would really have a chance at being 'Earth-shattering'.

When I was a youngster(in the USA), I once went to work as a machinist for an old native-German fellow. In the shop he had a sign posted which said:
"Why is there never enough time to do a thing right, but there is always time to fix it afterwards?"
And brother, we worked according to that standard. I remeber once spending a full (long) workday just to properly center a huge piece ina a lathe. And I was made to understand that if it took two days or whatever the amount of time, that it would be perfectly okay. The piece did not have to be re-done and was fabricated to a tolerance of two-tenthousandths of an inch (2/10,000)! In fact, correctly finishing that piece -which took 11 days all told, was what landed me a permanent job there.

So now we're going to have a 4.4CE -based on 4.3.1 or is that 4.1.2, which borrows half its' programs from 3.??, doesn't include any of the bugfixes from 4.2.1 which were first reported in 1.09 and introduce a bunch of new bugs, plus regressions mind you, by including untested combinations of software and libs. And before it is finished, there will be 34 derivatives -each with its' own similar mess and no hope of compatibility with any of the others. Plus, meanwhile we'll get a whole new version from the main devs which has a version number smaller than the last release and again starts with a half-clean slate in order to do the same song-and-dance all over again.

This all reminds me, somehow, of a Charlie Chaplin movie -played in reverse!

Version numbers mean absolutely nothing. Surely, no distro demonstrates this better than Puppy. What start out as bug-fix releases end up adding new and removing old software, upgrading versions, adding new setup routines etc.

What this distro needs more than anything in the world is to have even two releases which are based on the same basic content and versions, using the same concept of what should be done or not done to make it complete. That would really have a chance at being 'Earth-shattering'.

When I was a youngster(in the USA), I once went to work as a machinist for an old native-German fellow. In the shop he had a sign posted which said:
"Why is there never enough time to do a thing right, but there is always time to fix it afterwards?"
And brother, we worked according to that standard. I remeber once spending a full (long) workday just to properly center a huge piece ina a lathe. And I was made to understand that if it took two days or whatever the amount of time, that it would be perfectly okay. The piece did not have to be re-done and was fabricated to a tolerance of two-tenthousandths of an inch (2/10,000)! In fact, correctly finishing that piece -which took 11 days all told, was what landed me a permanent job there.

So now we're going to have a 4.4CE -based on 4.3.1 or is that 4.1.2, which borrows half its' programs from 3.??, doesn't include any of the bugfixes from 4.2.1 which were first reported in 1.09 and introduce a bunch of new bugs, plus regressions mind you, by including new untested combinations of software and libs. And before it is finished, there will be 34 derivatives -each with its' own similar mess and no hope of compatibility with any of the others. Plus, meanwhile we'll get a whole new version from the main devs which has a version number smaller than the last release and again starts with a half-clean slate in order to do the same song-and-dance all over again.

This all reminds me, somehow, of a Charlie Chaplin movie -played in reverse!

Cannot agree with you more Amigo. As a noob I am completely confused. Browsing the forum, I was flabbergasted to see the amazing work being put in on 2.14. It looks as if it will be way more up to date than 4.3 and run faster on smaller equipment. Lots of good apps for it too. But it will be completely ignored by most users who don't have time to really get into the forums, just because of the old version number. Maybe more guidance on the best distro for different purposes on the Wiki would help, but the same crazy duplication of effort plagues the documentation, so many users would never get to see that info either.

Even with this craziness Puppy is great for me. I have very limited Linux experience but it is way nicer than PCLinuxOS 2009.2, which is touted as a lightweight user-friendly distro but is 7x the size and half the speed on my relatively modern but low-end machines.

If more logical organization and QC was possible, without stifling the creative developers, Puppy could really go hypersonic (As opposed to only supersonic now!)

I'd just hate to scare off any of Puppies' wonderful developers, but perhaps a really lightweight policy manual, say a couple of pages max, might help?

...So the 432 number is used instead, making another bugfix of 431 impossible. Why not start at 435? In fact, since this is a 4.4 release, why not do the sort of thing that was first invented, oh, probably back in 1932, and call it 4.4.0? And not get concerned that the final release ends up with a number like 4.4.7? It's not a mark of shame, after all.

kennel comes before puppy alphabetically, so does that mean that puppy is a later version than kennel?
woof, dpup, upup, zpup, spup, rpmpup, barf, kennel, 4.1.2.31..11...1111(CE)
How should someone orient themselves?

As I type this I'm working on setting up a chromium build environment on my puppy 4.1.2. If I succeed in building chromium will you guys consider making it the browser in puppy 4.4CE if it proves to be stable? This would be the first ever linux distro to do this. (afaik) My estimates place the size of chromium compressed at about 15MB.

Great to have Chromium as alternative browser - feel free to make a pet.. People would test it and possibly enjoy it. _________________Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice? Get the sfs (English only).

Lobster you note that I am confused and then add to my confusion! I agree with Aitch that your reply doesn't really address Amigo's very valid points.

With the vast majority of software, the latest version number is the one for a new user to get. Sometimes there is a convention that odd and even numbers stand for stable and development versions. Whatever the numbering convention, it is stable and well explained on the software's main page. That makes it much easier for a new user to determine which puppy version will best suit his needs. With Puppy, there isn't even any clarity about which is the main documentation page. There are two wikis and the introductory page in Puppy 430 takes you to the older one. Neither of them gives the slightest clue on why so much effort was going into 214, or even that it was happening.

Surely the Puppy welcome page should point to the latest documentation? Older documentation should have the redirection to the newer documentation at the top rather than at the bottom of the page. There should also be a statement on what, if anything, was still likely to be relevant with the old document. However, it should be the aim to eliminate as much out of date stuff as possible.

Barry was monitoring the 214 work at the same time that he was putting a lot of work into 500, 431 and 218! Why was so much effort going into such ancient version numbers? Surely it would be far better to concentrate on the latest version? The only explanation that I can think of is that the earlier numbers refer to more lightweight versions. Wouldn't it be a lot more user-friendly to give these versions a new number that more accurately reflects their bang up to date status? Why not use something like "4.31Kxx,", where "xx" was the kernel version? There have been "retro" versions before, but the usage seems to have been inconsistent, and kernel numbers have also been used. Of course, it would be useful to use Alpha and Beta version number as well, where relevant. Whatever is used, it needs to be clearly explained on the main page.

I wholeheartedly agree with you that the developers are very smart, much smarter than me. That does not stop me sharing Amigo's concern about potential version control problems. Plenty of other very smart programmers seen to think that version control is very important, especially with collaborative development. I can't help but feel that the current situation is unnecessarily risky. Even if our concerns about reintroducing old bugs into new software were unwarranted, it seems to me that there are obvious problems with the user documentation that are at the least not helped by the unclear version numbering.

Maybe a lot of these problems might be made more tractable if the system was more modular?

As a final comment, I have never been able to see the attraction of calling different versions of any software by fancy names. "Puppy Linux 4.4" tells me that it is more up to date than 4.3 and when 5 comes out it will be an even better Puppy. There is no need for confusing names unless you are after marketing hype. Personally, I find Ubuntu's hype a put-off.

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